Salesforce.com was also pursuing LinkedIn

Salesforce.com was a rival potential bidder for LinkedIn in the process leading up to the professional networking website’s acquisition by Microsoft, according to people familiar with the matter.

Salesforce was advised by Goldman Sachs in the negotiations, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorised to speak on the matter.

Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, on Monday unveiled plans to buy LinkedIn for US$26,2bn in cash — the biggest deal in its history.

While Microsoft has maintained an interest in LinkedIn for several years, the software giant didn’t initiate the conversations that led to the current deal, said people familiar with the process.

Rather, LinkedIn executive chairman Reid Hoffman and CEO Jeff Weiner reached out to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to let him know that they were proceeding with a sale process that had led them to hire bankers and contact other potential buyers, the people said.

Salesforce, which competes with Microsoft in providing cloud-based software and services to businesses, could have used LinkedIn’s vast trove of data on workers around the world to bolster tools that help customers close sales deals.

LinkedIn profiles are packed with information on everything from users’ skills and responsibilities at past jobs to methods for contacting them.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

Nicole Leverich, a spokeswoman for Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, declined to comment but said more details on the sale process would come in a proxy statement soon.

Peter Wootton, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment, as did San Francisco-based Salesforce.

Earlier this month, Salesforce agreed to acquire e-commerce cloud software maker Demandware for $2,8bn. At the time, CEO Marc Benioff said this M&A season “is the most intense, most exciting I’ve ever seen”.

“We’re not winning every deal,” he said on CNBC in early June. “This is just a deal that we were actually able to get done.”

Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Goldman Sachs, which has previously advised Microsoft on big deals, couldn’t work with the Redmond, Washington-based software maker on the LinkedIn deal because it already had a role with another bidder. Morgan Stanley was sole adviser to Microsoft on the deal.